4 Steps to Facebook Ads

Facebook ads don’t have to be complicated. Or expensive. In fact, once you’ve been through the process of setting up a Facebook ad campaign for the first time, much of the work will be done for you.

There are 4 different stages of a Facebook ad campaign which you need to be aware of before you start out.

Let’s look at each one of them in turn :

An image

Text

A budget

Audience

Facebook Ad Image

When choosing an image for your Facebook ad campaign bear in mind the following :

It needs to belong to you, or you need permission to use it in an ad campaign. Stick with images that you have either taken or created yourself, or used from a stock image library such as Shutterstock, Pexels, or Unsplash.

Your image should be 1200 pixels wide by 627 pixels tall. If you’re using Canva to create your Facebook ad image, you can select custom dimensions and input those numbers to create the perfect size.

Keep it clean, no rude words or images. Your ad needs to be suitable for Facebook’s audience.

A compelling image will be one that makes you want to find out more, or makes you laugh, or catches your eye in some way. Cartoons and kids always do well in Facebook ad images.

Bear in mind the words you want to use on the image. Facebook only allows you to have 20% text but you can test this as you upload your image.

A call to action works well on the image. Buy Now. Sign Up. The word FREE does well in image text.

Above all else, make sure it is relevant to the offer that you are promoting.

Facebook Ad Text

When you use Power Editor to create an advert (which I suggest that you do) you will have lots of options to create the words that go with your image. If you forgot how a Facebook ad is structured, here’s an example before continuing on about the different parts:

The main areas you need to consider are :

Headline. This needs to be attention grabbing, it needs to address the fear or pain of your customer and it needs to be brief. For example :

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Then you need the news feed description. This is a short piece of text that goes below the headline, underneath the image and should describe what the advert is all about. For example :

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The text section is the bit that goes above the image. You can experiment here with both long and short text and see what works best for you. For example :

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You need to make sure that your words are compelling and encourage the person reading your advert to take action.

Facebook Ad Budget

Facebook ads do not have to be expensive, especially when you are at the stage of testing them out. I run successful campaigns on just £3 / £5 a day or sometimes even less.

When you are setting up your ad set (which is where you put in all of your targeting) you will be asked to choose a budget. This is the budget that will be shared across all of your adverts that you then set up.

I wouldn’t suggest starting off at less than £3 a day. When you know which of your adverts are working best, you can put more budget onto those specific ads.

If you are promoting an event, then you need your Facebook ad to run for at least 5-10 days before the event.

If you are trying to attract new signups to your list, then you can run your Facebook ad for as long as you want to. I always suggest starting with 7-10 days and then seeing how you go from there.

If you run a campaign for 10 days at a budget of £3 a day, your maximum spend will be £30 which should be achievable for any size of business.

Facebook Ad Audience

Creating your audience and targeting the right people is a huge part of your Facebook ad.

You can create your own custom and lookalike audiences from the audience tab of Ad Manager.

You need to create a custom audience before you can make a lookalike.

A custom audience is a list of people who have either joined your mailing list, or visited your website. You upload the email addresses and then Facebook matches them to any email addresses that have been used on Facebook. This gives you a custom audience.

You can then create a lookalike audience, based on that custom audience. Once you choose the custom audience that you want to use and the country, Facebook will give you a list of people who LOOK LIKE your custom audience to target. This is hugely powerful and a great way to get in front of a wider audience of people who will hopefully be your ideal customers.

Before you start looking at the targeting on Facebook, you need to know the following :

Who is your ideal customer? Male or Female? Age? What books do they read, what websites do they visit every day? What technology do they use? Are they business owners?

The more you know about your ideal customer the more you will be able to target them. Nobody should have a target audience of EVERYBODY, you need to be as niche as you can in order to find just the right customers for you.

Take some time and write down as much information as you can about your ideal customer.

Now you know what you need to have ready in order to run a successful Facebook ad campaign.